“…In recent years, coastal environments have drawn an increasing awareness globally, regionally, or locally as in many coastal regions, the rapid industrial, urban, and agricultural development has caused dramatic land use and land cover (LULC) changes and various water pollution events in coastal environments. …”

“…Technologically supported healthcare management is beginning to take center stage as advances occur in many aspects of healthcare, involving big data, artificial intelligence, and improved user interfaces. …”

“…Soybean is the main oilseed crop worldwide, a staple crop for protein-rich food and feed as well as a significant source of nutraceutical compounds with many different medical benefits. Soybean for Human Consumption and Animal Feed highlights the state of research in soybean nutritional attributes as well as science-based approaches defining the future of soybean for human consumption and animal feed. …”

“…It provides solutions to a variety of real-life problems in the fields of health, business, government, military, politics, security, education, and many more. This book compiles original and innovative findings on all aspects of computational optimization. …”

“…Swelling elastomers are being increasingly used as sealing elements in many applications in the petroleum industry. Pre- and post-swelling material characterization and performance analysis under actual field conditions are very important before the actual deployment of swell packers. …”

“…The electronic applications include silicon photonics, adaptive MEMS, VLSI design and applications, optical tweezers, sensors, and many more. The biological research involves the gene and drug delivery systems for cardiac tissue repair, implantable polymer-based microelectrode arrays, and integrated cell culture systems. …”

“…As a nanostructured material, ZnO exhibits many advantages for nanodevices. Moreover, it has the ability to absorb the UV radiation…”

“…This increase in use encourages data capturing for malicious purposes. To counteract this, many solutions have been proposed and introduced during the past 80 years, but Cryptography is the most effective tool. …”

“…Oaks are ecological dominants of many temperate forests, and evergreen species are major components of Mediterranean and subtropical woodlands. …”

“…Structural integrity and failure assessment have been considered by many fields of engineers as it is a multi-disciplinary concept. …”

“…This volume is the offspring of friendship, respect and commitment between two academic communities that admittedly have a lot in common, especially with regard to philosophy, and hopefully as many differences as needed in order to secure a long-lasting and fertile exchange of ideas; it is also the natural-born child of necessity: philosophy is about argumentation, debate and confrontation. …”

“…In the past few decades, imaging hardware has improved tremendously in terms of resolution, making widespread usage of images in many diverse applications on Earth and planetary missions. …”

“…In many industrial applications, metallic materials are exposed to harsh operating conditions. …”

“…Despite that, they continued to raise many questions and there was a lack of studies focusing entirely on them. …”

“…The new multidisciplinary study area of Wind Engineering was born as a response to the needs of design and construction for increasingly daring infrastructures: lighter materials and dimensions have made many projects very sensitive to the action of wind and therefore it is now necessary to study the applied fluid-dynamics, aero-dynamics of bodies and aero-elastics also for the civil engineering sector. …”

“…Bisphenols are a group of abundant environmental chemicals. Many bisphenol derivatives, including bisphenol A (BPA), are used to manufacture plastics, epoxy resins, and other products. …”

“…Today, there is much excitement and interest regarding hypersonic vehicles. In fact, many aerospace agencies, large industries, and several start-ups are involved in design activities and experimental campaigns both in wind tunnels and in-flight with full-scale experimental flying test beds and prototypes to make hypersonic travel almost as easy and convenient as airliner travel. …”

“…The conference was organized by the open access journal Polymers (MDPI) and offered researchers in the field of polymer and materials science the great opportunity to present their research and exchange ideas. Many works on Advanced Functional Polymeric Materials, Nanotechnologies in Polymer Science, Smart polymeric Synthesis, and Functional Biopolymers were presented…”

“…The ethnobiology of wild foods has received increasing attention within the scientific arena in recent years, since many traditional foodways around the world are still based on some local wild plant, fungal, and animal ingredients, as well as their food products and culinary preparations. …”

“…Still, in a vastly unknown field, a growing market and foggy regulatory framework, many challenges and research opportunities remain to be dealt with…”